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Foucault, biopolitics and the birth ofneoliberalismMichael A. Peters aa University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, USA

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Foucault, biopolitics and the birth of

neoliberalism

Michael A. Peters*University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s Foucault held a course at the College de France on

the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German

ordoliberalism, the Austrian school characterized by Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the

form of the Chicago school. Among Foucault’s great insights in his work on governmentality was

the critical link he observed in liberalism between the governance of the self and government of the

state—understood as the exercise of political sovereignty over a territory and its population. Liberal

modes of governing are distinguished by the ways in which they utilize the capacities of free acting

subjects and, consequently, modes of government differ according to the value and definition

accorded the concept of freedom. This paper first briefly discusses Foucault’s approach to

governmentality, before detailing and analysing Foucault’s account of German ordoliberalism, as a

source for the ‘social market economy’, and the EU’s ‘social model’.

Keywords: Economic freedom; Foucault; Governmentality; Liberalism; Neoliberalism;

Ordoliberalism

Introduction

The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to liberate the

individual from the state and its institutions, but to liberate ourselves from the state and

the type of individualization linked to it. (Foucault, 1982, p. 216)

Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. (Foucault,

1982, p. 221)

Foucault’s overriding interest was not in ‘knowledge as ideology’, as Marxists would

have it, where bourgeois knowledge, say modern liberal economics, was seen as false

knowledge or bad science. Nor was he interested in ‘knowledge as theory’ as classical

liberalism has constructed disinterested knowledge, based on inherited distinctions

*Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1310 S. Sixth Street,

Champaign, IL 61820, USA. Email: mpet001@ad.uiuc.edu

Critical Studies in Education

Vol. 48, No. 2, September 2007, pp. 165–178

ISSN 1750-8487 (print)/ISSN 1750-8495 (online)/07/020165-14

� 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17508480701494218

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from the Greeks, including Platonic epistemology and endorsed by the Kantian

separation of schema/content that distinguishes the analytic enterprise. Rather

Foucault examined practices of knowledge produced through the relations of power.1

He examined how these practices, then, were used to augment and refine the efficacy

and instrumentality of power in its exercise over both individuals and populations,

and how they also in large measure helped to shape the constitution of subjectivity.

Fundamental to his governmentality studies was the understanding that western

society professed to be based on principles of liberty and the rule of law, and the

legitimation of the state was said to be derived from political philosophies that

elucidated these very principles. Yet as a matter of historical fact, Western society

employed technologies of power that operated on forms of disciplinary order or were

based on biopolitical techniques that bypassed the law and its freedoms altogether.

As Colin Gordon (2001, p. xxvi) puts it so starkly: Foucault embraced Nietzsche as

the thinker ‘who transforms Western philosophy by rejecting its founding disjunction

of power and knowledge as myth’. By this he means that the rationalities of western

politics, from the time of the Greeks, had incorporated techniques of power specific

to western practices of government, first, in the expert knowledges of the Greek

tyrant and, second, in the concept of pastoral power that characterized ecclesiastical

government.

It is in this vein that Foucault examines government as a practice and problematic

that first emerges in the sixteenth century and is characterized by the insertion of

economy into political practice. Foucault (2001, p. 201) explores the problem of

government as it ‘explodes in the sixteenth century’ after the collapse of feudalism

and the establishment of new territorial states. Government emerges at this time as a

general problem dispersed across quite different questions: Foucault mentions

specifically the Stoic revival that focused on the government of oneself; the

government of souls elaborated in Catholic and Protestant pastoral doctrine; the

government of children and the problematic of pedagogy; and, last but not least,

the government of the state by the prince. Through the reception of Machiavelli’s

The prince in the sixteenth century and its rediscovery in the nineteenth century,

there emerges a literature that sought to replace the power of the prince with the art

of government understood in terms of the government of the family, based on the

central concept of ‘economy’. The introduction of economy into political practice is

for Foucault the essential issue in the establishment of the art of government. As he

points out, the problem is still posed for Rousseau, in the mid eighteenth century, in

the same term—the government of the state is modeled on the management by the

head of the family over his family, household and its assets.2

It is in the late sixteenth century, then, that the art of government receives its first

formulation as ‘reason of state’ that emphasizes a specific rationality intrinsic to the

nature of the state, based on principles no longer philosophical and transcendent, or

theological and divine, but rather centred on the problem of population. This became a

science of government conceived of outside the juridical framework of sovereignty

characteristic of the feudal territory and firmly focused on the problem of population

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based on the modern concept which enabled ‘the creation of new orders of

knowledge, new objects of intervention, new forms of subjectivity and … new state

forms’ (Curtis, 2002, p 2). It is this political–statistical concept of population that

provided the means by which the government of the state came to involve

individualization and totalization, and, thus, married Christian pastoral care with

sovereign political authority. The new rationality of ‘reason of state’ focused on the

couplet population-wealth as an object of rule, providing conditions for the emergence

of political economy as a form of analysis. Foucault investigated the techniques of

police science and a new bio-politics:

Which tends to treat the ‘population’ as a mass of living and co-existing beings, which

evidence biological traits and particular kinds of pathologies and which, in consequence,

give rise to specific knowledges and techniques. (Foucault 1989, p. 106, cited in Curtis,

2002, p. 507)

As Foucault (2001) comments in ‘The political technology of individuals’, the

‘rise and development of our modern political rationality’ as ‘reason of state’, that is,

as a specific rationality intrinsic to the state, is formulated through ‘a new relation

between politics as a practice and as knowledge’ (p. 407), involving specific political

knowledge or ‘political arithmetic’ (statistics); ‘new relationships between politics

and history’, such that political knowledge helped to strengthen the state and at the

same time ushered in an era of politics based on ‘an irreducible multiplicity of states

struggling and competing in a limited history’ (p. 409); and, finally, a new

relationship between the individual and the state, where ‘the individual becomes

pertinent for the state insofar as he can do something for the strength of the state’

(p. 409). In analysing the works of von Justi, Foucault infers that the true object of

the police becomes, at the end of the eighteenth century, the population; or, in other

words, the state has essentially to take care of men as a population. It wields its

power over living beings, and its politics, therefore has to be a biopolitics (p. 416).

Foucault’s lectures on governmentality were first delivered in a course he gave at

the College de France, entitled ‘Securite, territoire, population’, during the 1977–1978

academic year. While the essays ‘Governmentality’ and ‘Questions of method’ were

published in 1978 and 1980 respectively and translated into English in the collection

The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality (Burchell et al., 1991), it is only in the

last few months that the course itself has been transcribed from original tapes and

published for the first time (Foucault, 2004a), along with the sequel Naissance de la

biopolitique: Cours au College de France, 1978–1979 (Foucault, 2004b), although both

books remain to be translated.3 The governmentality literature in English, roughly

speaking, dates from the 1991 collection and has now grown quite substantially (see

Miller & Rose, 1990; Barry et al., 1996; Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999).4 As a number of

scholars have pointed out, Foucault relied on a group of researchers to help him in

his endeavours: Francois Ewald, Pasquale Pasquino, Daniel Defert, Giovanna

Procacci, Jacques Donzelot, on governmentality; Francois Ewald, Catherine Mevel,

Eliane Allo, Nathanie Coppinger and Pasquale Pasquino, Francois Delaporte and

Foucault, biopolitics and the birth of neoliberalism 167

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Anne-Marie Moulin, on the birth of biopolitics. These researchers working with

Foucault in the late 1970s constitute the first generation of governmentality studies

scholars and many have gone on to publish significant works too numerous to list

here. In the field of education as yet not a great deal has focused specifically on

governmentality.5

Gordon (2001, p. xxiii) indicates three shifts that took place in Foucault’s

thinking: a shift from a focus on ‘specialized practices and knowledges of the

individual person’ ‘to the exercise of political sovereignty by the state over an entire

population’; the study of government as a practice informed and enabled by a specific

rationality or succession of different rationalities; and, the understanding that

liberalism, by contrast with socialism, possessed a distinctive concept and rationale

for the activity of governing. Liberalism and neoliberalism, then, for Foucault

represented distinctive innovations in the history of governmental rationality. In his

governmentality studies Foucault focused on the introduction of economy into the

practice of politics and in a turn to the contemporary scene studied two examples:

German liberalism during the period 1948–1962, with an emphasis on the

ordoliberalism of the Freiburg school, and American neoliberalism of the Chicago

school. In this paper I focus on Foucault’s reading of German neoliberalism, the

emergence of the ‘social market’ which has significance not only for understanding

the historical development of an economic constitution and formulation of ‘social

policy’ (and the role of education policy within it), but also the development of the

European social model, more generally, and the continued relevance for Third Way

politics of the ‘social market economy’.

German neoliberalism and the birth of biopolitics

Naissance de la biopolitique (Foucault, 2004b) consists of 13 lectures delivered by

Foucault at the College de France (10 January–4 April 1979). It is helpful to see this

course in the series of 13 courses he gave from 1970 to 1984. The first five courses

reflected his early work on knowledge in the human sciences, concerning punish-

ment, penal and psychiatric institutions: ‘La Volonte de savoir’ (1970–1971), ‘Theories

et Institutions penales’ (1971–1972), ‘La Societe punitive’ (1972–1973), ‘Le Pouvoir

psychiatrique’ (1973–1974), ‘Les Anormaux’ (1974–1975). The remaining eight

courses focused squarely on governmentality studies, with a clear emphasis also on

the problematic (and hermeneutics) of the subject and the relation between

subjectivity and truth: ‘Il faut defender la societe’ (1975–1976), ‘Securite, Territoire,

Population’ (1977–1978), ‘Naissance de la biopolitique’ (1978–1979), ‘Du gouverne-

ment des vivants’ (1979–1980), ‘Subjectivite et Verite’ (1980–1981), ‘L’Hermeneutique

du subjet’ (1981–1982), ‘Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres’ (1982–1983), ‘Le

Gouvernement de soi et des autres: le courage de la verite’ (1983–1984). Even from this

list of courses it becomes readily apparent that the question of government

concerned Foucault for the last decade of his life and that for his governmentality

studies, politics were inseparable in its modern forms both from biology—biopower

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and the government of the living—and truth and subjectivity. It is important to note

that these same concerns in one form or another enter into Foucault’s formulations

in Naissance de la biopolitique.6

In the first lecture, having dealt with the question of method and reviewed the

preceding year, Foucault signals his intention to pursue the question of how the

introduction of political economy served as an internal (and defining) principle

limiting the practice of liberal government. In the second lecture, he considers

French radical jurisprudence and English utilitarianism as emerging solutions to the

problem of the limitation of the exercise of public power. He begins to specify the

novel features of the art of liberal government as consisting in three related aspects:

the constitution of the market as a form of truth and not simply a domain of justice;

the problem of the limitation of the exercise of public power; and the problem of

equilibrium in the internal competition of European states. With Adam Smith and

the Physiocrats he charts the birth of a new European model based on the principle

of the ‘freedom of the market’ that surface with discussion of international trade,

rights of the sea, and perpetual peace in the eighteenth century. I focus more heavily

on Lectures 4–8 in the course because they focus on German neoliberalism. They

also contain the bulk of the references to Hayek. Lectures 9 and 10 focus on

American neoliberalism, and Lectures 11 and 12 investigate the model and history of

homo economicus and the notion of civil society.7

Foucault begins the fourth lecture with a discussion of ‘fear of the state’ or state-

phobia which had surfaced in the 1920s with the calculation debate of Mises and

anti-socialist sentiments of the Austrian school and which came to a head in

Germany after the Second World War with the experience of National Socialism,

post-war reconstruction and the development of the Keynesian interventionist

welfare state in Britain and Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ in the US. (Foucault also

mentions the opposition between Keynes at Cambridge and Hayek at LSE. Hayek

was recruited by the Director of the London School of Economics, Lionel Robbins,

in the early 1930s). In the context of post-war reconstruction, Foucault details the

Marshall Plan, adopted in 1948, and the Scientific Council, set up in 1947 in

Germany with the function, in the Anglo-American zone, of undertaking the

reconstruction and administration of the economy. The Council comprised

representatives of the Freiburg school (W. Eucken, F. Bohm, A. Muller-Armack,

L. Miksch, A. Lampe, O. Veit and others) as well as members of the Christian

Socialists. Much of his analysis of post-war Germany in these early years focuses on

the role of Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977).

Erhard drafed the memorandum of war financing and debt consolidation and later

as a member of the Bavarian Cabinet became Minister of Economics responsible for

currency reform. As deputy of the Christian Democrats he was instrumental in

introducing the politico-economic concept of the ‘social market economy’ and

became Minister of Economics in the first Adenauer government in 1949. He later

became a council member of the Coal and Steel Community, Governor of the World

Bank, appointed Muller-Armack as Secretary of state at the Economics Ministry in

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Bonn from 1958–1963, played a strong role in the EEC, and eventually was elected

as the Federal Chancellor of the CDU in 1963 and remained so until 1967.8

Foucault’s emphasis is on the concept of the ‘social market economy’, which Erhard

established in 1948, fundamentally changing the West German economy and, with

it, the whole of post-war society. The social market economy was coined by the

national economist Muller-Armack to define an economic system based on free

market principles, aimed at guaranteeing economic efficiency and social justice with

a high degree of individual freedom. The crucial aspect for Foucault’s govern-

mentality studies is that the social market economy was devised as an economic

system combining market freedom with social equilibrium, where the government

played a strong regulatory role by creating a juridical–legal framework for market

processes that both secured competition and ensured social equity.

In the fifth lecture Foucault begins to outline the German programme of

neoliberalism by reference to the theoreticians, Eucken, Bohm, Muller-Armark and

Hayek. Eucken was co-founder of the ordoliberalen Freiburg school with the jurists,

Bohm and Hans Großmann-Doerth, who were united in their concern for

constitutional foundations of a free economy and society, an approach that combined

law and economics.9 They were concerned to provide an institutional framework for

the competitive order based on transparent rules for the efficient functioning of a

private market economy embodied in the concept of ‘complete competition’, which

involved state monitoring of monopolies and anti-trust laws. Other aspects of the

ordoliberalen framework included monetary stability, open markets, private property

and ownership of the means of production, and freedom of contract between

autonomous economic agents, including liability for one’s commitments and actions.

The ordoliberal Freiburg school, as Vanberg (2004) usefully notes, while certainly

part of the foundations on which the social market economy was created and

generally subsumed under the rubric of German neoliberalism, also exhibited

differences with neoliberal economists such as Muller-Armack, Ropke and Rustow.

For the Freiburg School the market order, as a non-discriminating, privilige-free [sic]

order of competition, is in and by itself an ethical order. As far as the need for ‘social

insurance’ is concerned, the Freiburg ordo-liberals recognized that the competitive

market order can be, and should be, combined with a system of minimal income

guarantees for those who are, temporarily or permanently, unable to earn a living by

providing saleable services in the market. They insisted, though, that such social

insurance provisions must be of a nondiscriminating, privilege-free nature, and must not

be provided in ways—e.g., in the form of subsidies or other privileges granted to

particular industries—that corrupt the fundamental ethical principle of the market order,

namely its privilege-free nature. Muller-Armack, by contrast, regards the market order as

an economically most efficient order, but not as one that has inherent ethical qualities. It

is a ‘technical instrument’ that can be used by society to produce wealth, but it does not

make itself for a ‘good’ society. It has to be made ‘ethical’ by supplementary policies, in

particular ‘social’ policies. The important point is that in Muller-Armack’s case, these

supplementary ‘social provisions’ that are supposed to make the market economy—

beyond its economic efficiency—ethically appealing are not constrained, as they are in for

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the Freiburg ordoliberals, by the proviso that they must not be in conflict with the

privilege-free nature of the rules of the game of the market. (Vanberg, 2004, p. 2)10

Foucault proceeds to discuss obstacles to political liberalism that had beset

Germany since the nineteenth century, including economic protectionism, the

socialism of the Bismarckian state, the role of the First World War and economic

reconstruction, a type of Keynesian rigidity, and the political economy of National

Socialism. The neoliberal critique of National Socialism and state-phobia is the

starting point for an extension of this critique to both the New Deal in the US and

Beveridge’s welfare state in the UK, that is, to the growth and development of the

power of the state, and to standardization and massification as infringements of

individual liberty defined through competition. Foucault claims that German

neoliberalism enjoyed a novel relationship with classical liberalism through its

constitutional theory of pure competition.

Lectures 4, 5 and 6 are devoted exclusively to ‘le neoliberalisme allemande’ and

Foucault in the last of these three lectures is concerned to discover what

distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism. He responds by arguing that

the problem of neoliberalism is knowledge (savoir) of how to exercise global political

power based on the principles of a market economy and he suggests that a major

transformation occurred with the association between the principle of the market

economy and the political principle of laissez-faire that presented itself through a

theory of pure competition. Pure competition emerged as the formal structure of

property that neoliberals saw as means for regulating the economy through the price

mechanism. Foucault traces problems of government in this period in relation to

monopolies and political society. He also examines the emergence in post-war

Germany of what he calls ‘politique de societe’ or Gesellschaftspolitik, which I

translate as ‘social policy’, and the ordoliberal critique of the welfare state (l’economie

de bien-etre), where society is modeled on the enterprise society, and enterprise

society and the good society come to be seen as one and the same.

The second aspect of social policy according to these German neoliberal thinkers

is the problem of right in a society modeled on economic competition of the market

which Foucault explores in Lecture 8 by reference to a text by Louis Rougier and the

idea of a legal–economic order, the question of legal intervention in the economy,

and the development of the demand for a judiciary. The concept of order (Ordnung)

is the central concept in the Freiburg school as it is at the basis of an understanding of

economic constitution, or the rules of the game, upon which economies or economic

systems are based. Eucken insisted that all economic activity necessarily takes place

within a historically evolved framework of rules and institutions (Vanberg, 2004,

p. 6) and that one improves the economy by improving the economic constitution or

the institutional framework within which economic activity takes place. This was, in

effect, the attempt to create conditions ‘under which the ‘invisible hand’ that Adam

Smith had described can be expected to do its work’ (Vanberg, 2004, p. 8). The

major historical step for German neoliberals was the shift from feudalism to a civil

law society where people enjoyed the same rights and status under the law and thus,

Foucault, biopolitics and the birth of neoliberalism 171

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had the freedom to contract with one another. This, in essence, represented their

conception of free market economy, which was based on the natural order of free

competition where all players met as equals and voluntary exchange and contract

enabled coordination of economic activity.

German neoliberalism and the birth of the European social model

Foucault’s prescient analysis in 1979 of German neoliberalism focused on the

Freiburg school of ordoliberalism as an innovation in the rationality of government

by devising a conception of the market order based squarely on the rule of law. This

conception, and its related versions in both German neoliberalism (after Muller-

Armack and others) and Austrian economics going back to Mises and Hayek, was

responsible for a form of constitutional economics that invented the ‘social market

economic’ and shaped Gesellschaftspolitik or ‘social policy’, as an ethical exception to

the rules of the market game. The challenge for scholars, especially in the German

context or those with the language skills that permit them to analyse formations of

German ‘social policy’ is to provide the genealogical investigation of the change of

values and shifting meanings underlying the development of educational policy as

part of ‘the social’, and later its shift to being at the centre of economic policy,

especially in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s when Third Way and EU policies

constitute education policy as an aspect of the ‘knowledge economy’.

Foucault’s analysis, formulated in the years 1978–1979, and then developed in a

series of subsequent themes as ‘the government of the living’, ‘subjectivity and truth’,

and ‘the government of self and others’, took up an account of the practices of

neoliberal governmentality as a set of novel practices introduced as a form of

economic liberalism, that operated on the premise of a critique of ‘too much

government’, what Foucault describes as a permanent critique of state reason.

Foucault would not have been unaware of the rise of a particular form of politics

referred to as the New Right, which under both Thatcher and Reagan, combined

elements of neoliberalism and neoconservativism in a contradictory formulation

wielded together through ‘great’ statesmanship.

In this new neoliberal climate established at a popular level in an Anglo-American

model that attained global ambitions under various guises through the old Bretton

Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and

other formations like the ‘Washington consensus’, the notion of the ‘social market

economy’, originally developed through German neoliberalism, offered some new

hope as the basis of Third Way economic policies and, more generally, as the basis

for the European social model (see Joerges & Rodl, 2004).

In the UK, Chancellor Gordon Brown’s foray into the discussion of the role and

limits of the market in the context of globalization has helped launch a new debate.

In the new BBC4 series, The commanding heights: the battle for the world economy

(2003) based on the book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, Gordon Brown,

who heads up the key policy-making IMF committee, told Yergin:

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The problem for the Left in the past was that they equated the public interest with public

ownership and public regulation, and therefore they assumed that markets were not in

the public interest. … [Markets] provide opportunities for prosperity, but equally they’re

not automatically equated with the public interest.

He went on to say:

The idea that markets must work in the public interest, the idea that governments have a

responsibility for the level of employment and prosperity in the economy, the idea that

governments must intervene on occasions—these are increasingly the ideas of our time.

In an age of consumerism, a fundamental question is to what extent, if at all, the

‘citizen–consumer’—a market-democracy hybrid of the subject—can shape privately

funded public services in ways other than through their acts of consumption and

whether acts of consumption can genuinely enhance the social dimensions of the

market (see Peters, 2004).

Foucault provides us with a means of analyzing: (1) the centrality of the rule of law

to liberalism and the notion of individual property rights; (2) the constitution of

freedom in its different historical forms and, crucially; and (3) the link between the

government of the state and the government of the self that has become so important

to understanding both neoliberalism and Third Way politics. This latter link is

especially important to neoliberalism insofar as it has institutionalized enterprise

culture, the twin notions of performance and accountability, and the generalization

of all forms of capitalization of the self, including most prominently the

entrepreneurial self. In addition, in his most recently published lectures from the

College de France, Foucault provides us with a complex genealogy of the three main

forms of contemporary economic liberalism in an outline that confounds standard

accounts of liberalism and neoliberalism by thinkers like David Harvey who adopt a

moralizing register and do not recognize the complexities of the birth of

neoliberalism, nor its contradictory effects.

Conclusion

Foucault’s governmentality studies in the later 1970s provides an analysis of the

introduction of political economy into government. This paper has examined the

route taken by Foucault in Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au College de France,

1978–1979 (Foucault, 2004b) and the paper focuses on the ordoliberalism of the

Freiburg school connecting Foucault’s reading of German neoliberalism to the

reconstruction of the German post-war economy and the emergence of the ‘social

market’. Foucault’s lectures provide us with a careful historical account of the origins

of contemporary neoliberalism in the period of German post-war reconstruction but

also in terms of the development of the Frieburg School that considerably predates

it. The benefits of this analysis is that in an era of state phobia caused by National

Socialism the market based on the rule of law was seen as an essential bulwark of

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liberalism. Foucault’s analysis gives us a rich and complex historical picture of the

birth of neoliberalism, the relationship between Freiburg ordoliberalism and

economic practice during the postwar period, both the anti-naturalism and ethics

of protection from the market, and a basis for understanding the historical

development of an economic constitution and formulation of ‘social policy’

including the role of education policy within it. It also helps us to understand,

however paradoxical it might seem, how the development of the European social

model and its the continued relevance for Third Way politics of the ‘social market

economy’ has its roots in the anti-naturalism of Frieburg school and the protections

it offered to social policy on ethical grounds. For the English-speaking world

Foucault’s analysis and his highly perceptive lectures on the other neoliberal schools

of economic thought and the historical origins of political economy (in particular, his

discussion of Adam Ferguson) will have to await the translation and publication in

English of Naissance de la biopolitique due in 2008.

Acknowledgement

An earlier version first appeared in Susanne Weber and Susanne Maurer (Eds),

Gouvernementalitat und Erziehungswissenschaft (Governmentality and educational

science), VS Verlag (Publisher for Social Sciences VS), Wiesbaden, Germany,

January 2006.

Notes

1. In his Resume du cours for 1979 (in Foucault, 2004b, p. 323) Foucault indicates that the

method he will adopt is based on Paul Veyne’s nominalist history and in this respect he writes:

‘Et reprenant un certain nombre de choix de methode deja faits, j’ai essaye d’analyser le

,,liberalisme.., non pas une theorie ni comme une ideologie, encore moins, bein entendu, comme

une manniere pour la ,,societe.. de ,,se\ representer..; mais comme une pratique, c’est-a-dire

comme une ,,maniere de faire.. orientee vers objectifs et se regulant par une reflexion continue. Le

liberalisme est a analyser alors comme principe et methode de rationalisation de l’exercice de

gouvernement—rationalisation qui obeit, et c’est la sa specificite, a la regle interne de l’economie

maximale’. Foucault (in 2001) explains in ‘Questions of method’ his emphasis on practice with

an accent on ‘eventalization’ and ‘the problem of rationalities’. He refers to, ‘Eventalizing

singular ensembles of practices, so as to make them graspable as different regimes of

‘‘jurisdiction’’ and ‘‘verification’’’ (p. 230) and he ascribes the method to Veyne with the

following remark ‘it’s a matter of the effect on historical knowledge of a nominalist critique

itself arrived at by way of historical analysis’ (2001, p. 238). The concept of practice here is

crucial to understanding Foucault. Stern (2000, fn. 33, p. 358) indicates in a footnote a

reference to Dreyfus’ course at the NEH Summer Institute on Practices on 24 July 1997,

under the title ‘Conclusion: how background practices and skills work to ground norms and

intelligibility: the ethico–political implications’ and summarizes Dreyfus’ account of five

‘theories’ (Wittgenstein and Bourdieu; Hegel and Merleau-Ponty; Heidegger; Derrida; and

Foucault). He summarizes Foucault’s notion as follows: ‘Problematization. (Foucault)

Practices develop in such a way that contradictory actions are felt to be appropriate. Attempts

to fix these problems lead to further resistance. This leads to a hyperactive pessimism: showing

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the contingency of what appears to be necessary and engaging in resistance to established

order’. See also Schatzki et al. (2001).

2. Rousseau’s begin his famous 1755 text ‘Discourse on political economy’ with the following

remark: ‘The word Economy, or OEconomy, is derived from oikos, a house, and nomos, law,

and meant originally only the wise and legitimate government of the house for the common

good of the whole family. The meaning of the term was then extended to the government of

that great family, the state’. Rousseau, goes on to distinguish between the government of

the family and the state, and to deny there is anything in common except the obligations that

the head or sovereign owe to their subjects. They are, he argues, based on different rules and

‘the first rule of public economy is that the administration of justice should be conformable

to the laws’ and to the general will. For the full text see: www.constitution.org/jjr/polecon.

htm.

3. The Foucault archives have been recently relocated from the IMEC (Institut Memoires de

l’Edition Contemporaine) Paris address (9, rue Bleue, F-75009 Paris) to Abbaye d’Ardenne

(14280 Saint Germaine la Blanche-Herbe), email: bibliotheque@imec-archives.com. ‘Il faut

defender la societe’, a course Foucault delivered in 1975–1976, was translated by David Macey

and published in 2003 by Penguin as Society must be defended (Foucault, 2003). While courses

for 1977–1978, 1978–1979, as previously mentioned, and 1981–1982 (‘L’Hermeneutique de

sujet’) have been recently published (in the Gallimand/Seuill series), courses for the years

1979–1980, 1980–1981, 1982–1983, 1983–1984 are still only available from the IMEC

Foucault archive as recorded tapes.

4. The governmentality literature has grown up around the journal Economy and Society, and

includes the work of Cruickshank, Hindess, Hunter, Larner, Minson, O’Malley, Owen, and

others, as well as those referred to above, most of whom have published in Economy and Society

(for aims and scope, and table of contents, see www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/

03085147.asp).

5. See my essay ‘Why Foucault?’ (Peters, 2004) where I discuss Foucault studies in the English-

speaking world by reference to the work of Marshall, Olssen, Ball, Popkewitz and Brennan,

Besley, Baker, Middleton and myself. My work on Foucault’s governmentality dates from

Peters (1994), with additional work in 1996 (with Marshall), Peters (1996), Peters (1997),

and Peters (2001a, b, c). For additional work on Foucault see Peters (2003a, b), Peters

(2004), Peters (2005a, b). Educational Philosophy and Theory published a special issue in 2006

entitled ‘The learning society and governmentality’ edited by Masschelein, Brockling, Simons

and Pongratz.

6. As he writes in his Resume du cours (in Foucault, 2004b, p. 323): ‘Le theme retenu etait doc

la «biopolitique»: j’entendais par la la maniere don’t on a essaye, depuis le XVIII siecle, de

rationaliser les problemes poses a la pratique gouvenrement par les phenomenes propres a une

ensemble de vivants constitutes en population: sante, hygiene, natalitie, longevite, races…’

7. Foucault investigates the notion of civil society—a twin notion to homo economicus and

indissociable elements of the technology of liberal government—by reference to Adam

Ferguson (1996), a philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose An essay on the history of

civil society, first published in 1767, as an inquiry into the ‘natural history of man’, seeks to

elucidate the general characteristics of human nature (including principles of self-preservation,

union, war, etc), provide a ‘history of rude nations’, policy and arts, and comments on the

advancement of civil and commercial arts, as well as ‘the decline of nations’ and ‘corruption

and political slavery’.

8. Foucault refers to the work of F. Bilger (1964) La Pensee economique liberale de l’Allemagne

contemporaine. For a brief chronological biography of Erhard see www.dhm.de/lemo/html/

biografien/ErhardLudwig/.

9. Foucault notes that Eucken knew and met with Husserl and a footnote (fn. 2, p. 125) in the

text refers to a paper that discusses the phenomenological roots of German ordoliberalism.

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10. Vanberg (2004) argues that the constitutional approach of the ordoliberals distanced itself

from laissez-faire economics and is closely modelled by James Buchanan’s constitutional

economics. Vanberg also notes differences that occurred in discussions at the Mont Pelerin

Society between Eucken and Mises. While Eucken knew Hayek since the early 1920s,

Vanberg argues that ordoliberalism was a German invention that was not influenced by

Anglo-Saxon influences or the Austrian school. See also Broyer (1996) and Witt (2002). For

the continued relevance of ordoliberalism and the social market model see Joerges and Rodl

(2004).

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